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Ryan Cooper in the Washington Post: "It's State of the Union time tomorrow, and the lack of progress on President Obama's second term legislative agenda has led many pundits to conclude that his presidency is basically over.... These pundits are right about one thing: probably no legislation of significance will pass for the remainder of Obama's presidency. But what Obama can do, and is doing already, is use the executive branch to achieve a great deal." ...
... Digby: "... you can't help but wonder just what the hell took them so long to realize that all their supporters relentlessly flogging the idea that the poor president is little more than a figurehead might just not reflect well on legacy of the man the nation elected to be its national leader. The fact is that he does have power. Let's hope he uses it well." ...
... Oliver Knox of Yahoo! News: "President Barack Obama will announce Tuesday that he is ordering an increase in the federal hourly minimum wage to $10.10 for workers on new federal government contracts for services, like janitors and construction workers, according to the White House. Obama will lay out his executive order in the State of the Union address at 9 p.m. before a joint session of Congress and urge lawmakers to join him in raising the minimum wage for all workers." ...
... Mackenzie Weinger of Politico: "Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) on Tuesday called President Barack Obama's plan to sign an executive order to raise the minimum wage for federal contract workers a 'constitutional violation.'" CW: Expect much more along this same line. ...
... Dana Davidsen of CNN: "Gabby Giffords' gun control group will air an ad featuring the former congresswoman around Tuesday's State of the Union address, pushing Congress to take action on legislation expanding background checks on firearms sales":
... Zachary Goldfarb of the Washington Post: "Democrats consider President Obama's State of the Union address on Tuesday a launching point for a year of sustained assault on Republicans over a populist economic agenda, part of an effort to focus more on bread-and-butter issues and less on income inequality. Party officials say they hope Obama's speech will set the stage for Senate and House candidates to confront Republicans on issues such as the minimum wage, unemployment benefits and access to college education. Their minimum goal is to preserve Democratic control of the Senate, because not doing so could cripple what remains of the president's legislative agenda."
Original (non-colorized) by Dorothea Lange.Ed O'Keefe of the Washington Post: "Negotiators agreed Monday evening on a new five-year Farm Bill that slashes about $23 billion in federal spending by ending direct payments to farmers, consolidating dozens of Agriculture Department programs and by cutting $9 billion from the federal food stamp program. House leaders said they planned to pass the 950-page bill by Wednesday evening -- meaning that for the second time in two weeks lawmakers will vote a bill running hundreds of pages just hours after its formal release.... The changes would reduce, but not eliminate, SNAP payments by about $90 monthly for about 850,000 households." CW: Tighten your tiny belts, children. ...
... "Congress Agrees that People Should Go Hungry." Charles Pierce: "How, precisely, does this particular bill help 'businesses create jobs'? Almost a million people will have less money to spend on luxuries like heat and food. That doesn't help you if you're creating jobs in grocery stores or selling heating oil. Teachers will have to cope with dozing, hungry children while their unemployed parents try very hard not to yawn their way through job interviews. But the Republicans didn't get absolutely everything they wanted, and the Democrats agreed to cut twice what they'd proposed, and the deal was struck among people who never will feel its real effects, and that's the way things are supposed to work in this great Republic of ours." ...
... Molly Ball of the Atlantic has a long, interesting piece on the politics of the farm bill. Among other things, she notes that Republicans are losing farmers' votes because Tea Party libertarians ignore farmers' concerns & held up the farm bill. For instance, there's this:
Joye and Julius Davis, "both in their 60s, farm corn, peanuts, cotton, and wheat in Sumter County[, South Carolina]. She told me she thought putting food stamps into the farm bill had confused the public.... Obama, she said darkly, wants to give handouts to 'his people,' most of whom are not really needy but 'have figured out how to beat the system. I have seen on the street signs that say "Obamaphone,'" she said. 'I pay for mine, but it's a free phone for them.' (The myth that the Obama Administration has created a program to give taxpayer-funded cell phones to poor people is commonly repeated on right-wing talk radio.) Farm payments, on the other hand, were something landowners had earned. 'I work for what I have,' she said. 'So I have a sore spot about that.' Later, I found the Davises ... had received at least $108,000 from the government between 1995 and 2012.
Paul Krugman: "The whole politics of poverty since the 70s has rested on the popular belief that the poor are Those People, not like us hard-working real Americans. This belief has been out of touch with reality for decades -- but only now does reality seem to be breaking in. But what it means now is that conservatives claiming that character defects are the source of poverty, and that poverty programs are bad because they make life too easy, are now talking to an audience with large numbers of Not Those People who realize that they are among those who sometimes need help from the safety net."
Mean Guys Insurance Co-op, Ltd. Sy Mukherjee of Think Progress: "On Monday, a trio Republican senators unveiled an alternative to Obamacare eerily similar to the one that former presidential candidate Mitt Romney proposed in 2012. The plan boils down to a rehash of boilerplate conservative ideas for 'market-oriented' and 'consumer-driven' health care reform -- code words that really mean deregulating the insurance industry and forcing consumers to shoulder a larger burden of their health care costs.... 1. It would kick millions of Americans off of their health plans.... 2. It dismantles many of Obamacare's core consumer protections.... 3. It does almost nothing for Americans with pre-existing conditions.... 4. It would make millions pay more for their employer coverage.... 5. It provides fewer subsidies to help Americans buy health care." ...
... Sam Baker of the National Journal: "A trio of Senate Republicans on Monday introduced their plan to replace Obamacare with a new system that is built largely around making individuals responsible for a higher portion of their health care costs.... That debate notwithstanding, three Republicans with long backgrounds in health care policy -- Sens. Orrin Hatch, Richard Burr, and Tom Coburn -- have put together a framework they say should take the place of Obamacare if a Republican president and Congress were to repeal the law after the 2016 elections. In essence, the plan attempts to lower health care costs by making people shoulder a greater share of those costs -- or 'sensitizing' consumers to the actual cost of health care, as Senate aides put it in a meeting with reporters on Monday." CW: Yes, if people found out health insurance was expensive, they wouldn't get sick so much.
Jonathan Weisman & Ashley Parker of the New York Times: "The House Republican leadership's broad framework for overhauling the nation's immigration laws will call this week for a path to legal status -- but not citizenship -- for many of the 11 million adult immigrants who are in the country illegally, according to aides who have seen the party's statement of principles. For immigrants brought to the United States illegally as young children, the Republicans would offer a path to citizenship. But even before the document is unveiled later, some of the party's leading strategists and conservative voices are urging that the immigration push be abandoned, or delayed until next year, to avoid an internal party rupture before the midterm elections."
Katrina vanden Heuvel in the Washington Post: "On critical issues, politicians of all stripes are finding common ground not by discarding their differences but rather by overcoming the ideological and political pressure that would typically prevent them from working together, even on areas of agreement."
Mark Apuzzo of the New York Times: "The Obama administration will allow Internet companies to talk more specifically about when they're forced to turn over customer data to government agents, the Justice Department said Monday. The new rules resolve legal fights with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook before the nation's secret surveillance court. But while under the terms of the new arrangement, customers will have a somewhat better idea of how often the government demands information, they still won't know what's being collected, or how much." ...
... Leaky Apps, Angry Birds. James Glanz & Andrew Lehren of the New York Times & Jeff Larson of ProPublica: "... the National Security Agency and its British counterpart have been trying to exploit a basic byproduct of modern telecommunications.... According to dozens of previously undisclosed classified documents, among the most valuable of those unintended intelligence tools are so-called leaky apps that spew everything from users' smartphone identification codes to where they have been that day ... according to the documents, provided by Edward J. Snowden...." The Guardian story, by James Ball, is here.
Greg Sargent: "Pew Research just released some new polling that confirms the GOP is seen as far more uncompromising and ideologically extreme than the Democratic Party, while Dems hold a big edge on which party is concerned with the needs of ordinary people.... Today's Pew poll suggests Americans may broadly grasp the basic imbalances at play in our politics, even if many pundits continue to refuse to reckon with them."
Trouble in Right Wing World. Greta Van Susteren of Fox "News": "What is wrong with this guy? ... I don't care how much you disagree or agree with Texas' Wendy Davis, you have to agree that this guy, Erick Erickson, is a real jerk and is really lousy at being a spokesperson for his views."
Presidential Race 2016
Hillary Clinton speaks at the National Automobile Dealers Association:
Jasmine Sacher & Bob Cusack of the Hill: "Fifty-six Democratic lawmakers say they would endorse Hillary Clinton for president if she launches a 2016 White House bid, according to a survey conducted by The Hill. [SEE COMPLETE LIST] Twenty-two congressional Democrats had already publicly endorsed Clinton. An additional 34 members told The Hill that if Clinton runs, they would back her in the Democratic primary. "
Local News
Mark Caputo of the Miami Herald: "In the fallout from his cocaine bust last year, Fort Myers Congressman Trey Radel submitted his resignation Monday because, he said, he couldn't escape the ;serious consequences' of his actions.... Radel, scheduled to leave office at 6:30 p.m. Monday, announced he was quitting just as a House inquiry into his cocaine use started to get under way. Gov. Rick Scott will call a special election to fill the vacancy. In a sign of a looming and acrimonious intra-party squabble, GOP candidates and potential candidates had already started jockeying to run for the seat. And they and their surrogates are already attacking each other.... The district is solidly Republican. Mitt Romney won it with 61 percent of the vote in 2012, when the GOP presidential candidate lost statewide to President Obama by about a point." ...
... CW: As you all can imagine, I am disconsolate at losing my Cokehead Congressman. Fortunately, I can look forward to shortly being represented by another craven jerk.
Your Vote Counts. Laura Vozella of the Washington Post: "Democrats prepared to seize control of the Virginia Senate on Monday after winning a recount by just 11 votes in a razor-thin special election, giving Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe's first-year agenda a crucial boost.... Going into [the recount], Del. Lynwood W. Lewis Jr. (D-Accomack) was ahead of Republican businessman Wayne Coleman by just nine votes. His lead grew to 11 by the end Monday after officials recounted some votes by hand and teams of lawyers from both sides wrangled over a handful of contested ballots."
AP: "Ben Barlyn says he was fired from his position as a Hunterdon County[, New Jersey,] prosecutor because he refused to drop a case against a Chris Christie ally." ...
... The Star-Ledger editors have more. They want a state and/or federal investigation.
News Ledes
New York Times: "Pete Seeger, the singer, folk-song collector and songwriter who spearheaded an American folk revival and spent a long career championing folk music as both a vital heritage and a catalyst for social change, died Monday. He was 94 and lived in Beacon, N.Y." Seeger's Rolling Stone obituary is here. ...
... Here's a transcript of Seeger's testimony before the House Unamerican Activities Committee.
AP: "The prime minister of protest-torn Ukraine submitted his resignation on Tuesday, saying he hoped the move would help bring peaceful resolution to the crisis that has gripped the country for two months. Mykola Azarov's resignation would remove one of the figures most despised by the opposition. It came as the parliament opened a special session that is expected to repeal harsh anti-protest laws that were imposed this month. Those laws set off the police-protester clashes in which at least three protesters died."
New York Times: "Monday, the 69th anniversary of the day Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz, was observed as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Yet a third or more of the almost six million Jews killed in the Holocaust perished not in the industrial-scale murder of the camps, but in executions at what historians call killing sites: thousands of villages, quarries, forests, wells, streets and homes that dot the map of Eastern Europe. The vast numbers killed in what some have termed a 'Holocaust by bullets' have slowly garnered greater attention in recent years as historians sift through often sketchy and incomplete records that became available after the collapse of the Soviet Union."
Politico: "Jesse Ryan Loskarn, the former top Senate GOP aide who committed suicide last week, said in a letter released by his family that he was sexually abused as a child, and the horror from that episode eventually led him down a path toward possessing child pornography. In a typed letter just over two pages long and posted online by his mother late Monday night, Loskarn revealed in vivid detail his personal experiences and apologized profusely for possessing child pornography, which led to his arrest by federal agents on Dec. 11."